This application claims the priority of German application 197 37 599.5, filed Aug. 28, 1997, the disclosure of which is expressly incorporated by reference herein.
The present invention relates to a steerable axle spring suspension for a two-wheeler having at least one sliding tube and having at least one longitudinal control arm which is mounted to be swivellable about a transverse axis of the vehicle and which is connected with the sliding tube by way of at least one joint.
It is known to guide a front wheel of a two-wheeler in a front wheel fork which, in turn, in a telescopically compressible manner, is steerably connected with the vehicle frame by a longitudinal control arm which, swivellably about a transverse axis of the vehicle, is fixedly mounted on the vehicle frame. German Registered Utility Model G 94 07 208 U1 describes such an axle suspension in which case the two fork struts of the front wheel fork are, in addition, slidably in the longitudinal direction, guided in an upper fork bridge. In such a known construction, the fork struts of the front wheel fork have a very long construction and can therefore not be constructed easily and at reasonable cost.
Particularly if the fork struts of the front wheel fork are constructed as sliding tubes, which are telescopically slidably guided by vertical tubes, the bores in the sliding tubes must be constructed to be very deep in order to obtain sufficiently large spring paths. The sliding surfaces between the vertical tube and the sliding tube must be very carefully machined at high expenditures to obtain a good response behavior of the spring suspension.
In addition, a very robust and heavy construction of the front wheel fork is required if its deformation contributes to the reduction of the kinetic energy of the vehicle. If the fork struts of the front wheel fork are dimensioned to be very strong for this purpose and are therefore heavy, however, an undesirable increase of the moments of inertia about the front axle results as well as an enlargement of the unsprung masses which impairs the driving dynamics of the vehicle.